For geobranding professionals charged with marketing their countries, the Coronavirus feels like a punch to the gut. More than 200 deaths and 9,700 confirmed cases of infection, with the number of new cases growing tenfold last week. Delta Air Lines and American Airlines announced they will be suspending service to China.
The Coronavirus outbreak began in Wuhan, a travel hub with an average of 3,500 people taking flights every day. There are now confirmed cases in 22 countries, including top travel destinations such as Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Thailand, Australia, Malaysia, Macau, France, Italy, Sri Lanka, United Arab Emirates, Britain and the United States.
The future looks bleak — or does it?
The only good news is that China officials learned from their veiled response to the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak in 2002. Back then, China denied the existence of SARS and took measures to hide the outbreak, both inside and outside its borders. When the news finally broke, SARS took countries by surprise resulting in chaos and panic.
This time, China appeared to move quicker to contain the Coronavirus (although the New York Times recently reported that Chinese officials, in the seven days following the virus’s initial appearance in early December, chose to put secrecy ahead of openly confronting the growing crisis). On December 31, China informed the World Health Organization, which, in turn, declared a global health emergency, and locked down 20 million people in Wuhan. Less than 30 days later, the U.S. State Department raised its travel advisory to Level 4 — “do not travel.” Health officials around the world began screening passengers at airports.
Comparing Coronavirus and SARS may give a glimpse into the future. Passenger traffic has quadrupled since the SARS outbreak, but China has imposed travel restrictions in light of Coronavirus.
Both viruses come from the same family and are moderately infectious, although the Coronavirus fatality rate appears to be less than 3 percent, much less than SARS. It took 20 months to get a SARS vaccine ready for trial. A Coronavirus vaccine is a year away, at best.
But the SARS vaccine was never needed — and this should give us hope.
“The SARS epidemic mysteriously disappeared in the summer of 2003, nine months after it arrived,” writes Thomas Abraham, author of “Twenty-First Century Plague: The Story of Sars,” in a Guardian article. “Unlike other diseases, it has never returned to the places that it once terrorised. No one knows why this is so. If China gets incredibly lucky, this new virus too could disappear.”
